This page is a compendium of items of interest - news stories, scurrilous rumors, links, academic papers, damnable prevarications, rants and amusing anecdotes - about LAUSD and/or public education that didn't - or haven't yet - made it into the "real" 4LAKids blog and weekly e-newsletter at http://www.4LAKids.blogspot.com . 4LAKidsNews will be updated at arbitrary random intervals.

Tuesday, December 22, 2015

UPDATED: NEW TOOLS MEANT TO HELP SPECIAL EDUCATION STUDENTS TAKE STANDARDIZED TESTS ACTUALLY MADE IT HARDER

by Laurie Udesky | The Hechinger Report/LA Times | http://lat.ms/1TfajtZ

Dec 22, 2015::Last spring, Julia Kim’s students with
disabilities at Fairmount Elementary in San Francisco were ready to take a new
standardized test. They were excited that it had been built especially for
them.

In past years, students with visual perception disorders had
test questions read out loud. This time, the students sat in front of their
computers awaiting the new technology designed to help them complete the test
on their own for the first time.

But as soon as the first question appeared, students
complained that the print was too small.

The color contrast tool, which used a background to minimize
visual distortions, had been developed for the Common Core test to make it
easier for special education students to see. But in practice, the tool
prevented the one student in Kim’s class who used it from reading questions and
marking answers. “I can’t see it,” he told Kim. It was too dark to read.

The Common Core tests, which are based on learning goals
adopted in 43 states and the District of Columbia, offer many state-of-the-art
technological tools to level the playing field for special education students.
But Kim’s students were not alone. School employees across California have
reported glitches in the tests’ enhancements for students with disabilities.

A field test administered in 2014 was meant to iron out the
kinks. As a result, a noise buffer and closed captioning were added, according
to an email sent last April on behalf of Michelle Center, who is now the
California Department of Education’s director of the Assessment Development
& Administration Division.

Still, according to teachers and administrators, special
education students across California spent days last spring toiling over
computerized tests that their teachers say often made it more difficult, not
easier, for them to access the material.

“The majority of my students weren’t able to process any of
the tests,” Kim said.

In San Francisco, one school found that text-to-speech tools
read passages too quickly for students to follow, so teachers had to jump in
and read the text out loud — distracting other students. The California School
for the Blind found that different accessibility tools, such as Braille, could
not be used at the same time as text-to-speech. In the Santa Ana Unified School
District, curriculum specialist Gabriela Aguirre said she was concerned that
the text-to-speech voice was distracting to students because it sounded
robotic.

Precisely how many problems occurred with the tools known as
accommodations last spring is not known. The California Department of Education
didn’t specifically track accessibility glitches, Pam Slater, who worked as a
CDE spokesperson until last week, said in an interview this fall.

Kim administered the exams to 14 students with disabilities
in third through fifth grades. She and other teachers said they had problems
with the accommodations. Those glitches only worsened anxiety about a test they
had already worried was going to be especially difficult because of the tougher
new standards.

Test scores for students in general, including those with
disabilities, were low, as the state announced this fall. While there is no way
to know what effect the lackluster accommodations might have had on the
results, it’s clear that tools meant to help students with disabilities take
tests as effectively as their peers need a lot of improvement.

Of the more than 300,000 students with disabilities who took
the tests in California, 88% did not meet achievement targets in English
language arts and 91% did not meet targets in math, according to data on the
state’s testing website. Among California’s general education students, 52%
failed to meet achievement targets on the exam in English language arts and 63%
failed in math. Students with disabilities across the country similarly had
lower scores than their peers on the new tests.

Slater said the California scores reflect a “starting point
from which to make improvements in the coming years.”

There is no question that the tests are innovative. The new
test promised technology unavailable to students with disabilities during the
old paper-and-pencil exams. Instead of teachers reading the test aloud to
students with disabilities, the new test had headphones and a dictation tool.
And instead of an interpreter standing in front of the class to sign for
students with hearing impairments, the new test provided videos of interpreters
and closed captioning.

But for many, the upgrades were a letdown. The dictation
tool used a robotic voice reading the text at a fast clip. In the videos, signs
used by American Sign Language (ASL) interpreters were often indecipherable
because the interpreters were wearing light-colored clothing or because they
were using an ASL dialect unfamiliar to students. The text-to-speech tool did
not work for students taking the test who were also using Braille or
magnification. Students using Braille were constantly interrupted while waiting
for Braille printouts of sections of the test, one teacher said.

Students with disabilities in Oregon and Washington had
similar problems with accommodations, according to teacher surveys by the
Washington and Oregon affiliates of the National Education Assn., a teachers
union.

The Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium’s executive
director, Tony Alpert, stands behind his firm’s sign language videos. “Smarter
Balanced used a very specific process to produce high-quality videos that use
standard American Sign Language consistent with best practices and the audience
of experts,” he said. He added that often the problems weren’t with the test
itself. “In some cases, there are temporary local technology issues that may
cause a problem with a test.”

The text-to-speech function, Slater said, will be corrected
for next spring’s test so that students will be able to control the pacing. And
they will have the option to choose a more human-sounding voice.

Also next spring, blind students who use Braille will have
the option to take the test entirely on paper or in an online “fixed form” — a
test in which everyone answers the same questions — according to Bill
Ainsworth, a California Department of Education spokesman.

Tweaks to the test beyond the accessibility features also
affected students with disabilities. For the first time, the exams use a
technology called computer adaptive testing to tailor the difficulty of
questions for each student based on his or her previous response. The tests can
assess material at two grade levels below or above the student’s actual grade,
according to Kelli Gauthier. Gauthier is the director of policy analysis and
communications for the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, which developed
the Common Core exam taken by students in California and 17 other states.

That the questions get harder as students answer correctly
is a “double-edged sword for students with disabilities,” said Matthew Navo,
the superintendent of Sanger Unified School District in California’s Central
Valley. “Students with disabilities deal their whole lives with trying to
overcome life’s barriers,” Navo said. “To give them an assessment that gets
more difficult as they get better, they tap out sooner.”

Stephanie Herlich, an assistive technology specialist at the
California School for the Blind in Fremont, Calif., said that she would have
liked to see an even greater span in the grade levels tested. “We’ve had
tears,” she said. “We’ve had kids turn off that didn’t want to do it anymore.”

Maureen O’Leary Burness, who served until recently as the
co-executive director of the Statewide Special Education Task Force, said last
spring’s test might not have yielded accurate scores. In its first year, she
said, it was “a test of the test.” But going forward, she added, “the big
picture is we really do need to be accountable to all students in California.”
___________________

UPDATE: These are the problems some California teachers had when they tested students with disabilities

by Laurie Udesky | The Hechinger Report/LA Times | http://lat.ms/1PmMC3Y

By the time students with disabilities sat
down to take California's standardized tests last spring, they had been
promised a set of new tools to help them better access the questions.
But some teachers and administrators across the state have reported that
this didn't exactly happen.

The
California Department of Education says it did not track issues related
to the tools created for disabled students using the new tests, which
were tied to the Common Core State Standards. Here are some examples of technological problems that popped up.

An overly robotic text-to-speech voice. Gabriela
Aguirre, a curriculum specialist for special education in the Santa Ana
Unified School District, said she was concerned that students using a
text-to-speech tool could be distracted by the voice, which she
described as “a bit robotic.”

Text-to-speech tools that read passages too quickly for students to follow.
For students in Los Angeles, the problem occurred on their iPads. The
district had them continue tests on laptops or desktop computers. San
Francisco Unified assigned staff members to read the tests aloud to
students. One of those teachers, Amy Buffington, gave the test to
students at Glen Park School. “So we’re sitting there reading them
questions while another student is working on a different problem,” she
said. “It was distracting to them.”

American Sign Language signing that disappeared into a light-colored background.
Gloria Olamendi, the coordinator for special education services for the
Santa Ana Unified School District, said that students watching a video
on the test had difficulty reading the hand signs over the interpreter’s
light-colored clothing.

American Sign Language videos that used dialects unfamiliar to students. At
the California School for the Deaf in Riverside, Stacey Hausman, the
school’s testing coordinator and teaching specialist, said that
interpreters were using signs unfamiliar to students. Students taking
the math exams, for example, did not understand the sign used for the
math term absolute value. “Their teacher used a different sign in
class,” she explained.

Tests that didn’t allow Braille or screen magnification to be used at the same time as the text-to-speech tool. Stephanie
Herlich of the California School for the Blind said that the problem
was “a limitation of the test,” because the software for Braille and
text magnification that students are accustomed to using is designed to
have speech read out loud at the same time. “This affected all of the
students” who used those programs, and the school had to assign staff
members to read the test individually to them.

Braille that took so long to print out that students’ testing was constantly interrupted. Herlich
estimates that 20% of staff time at the California School for the Blind
was spent waiting for portions of the test to be printed out.

These articles were produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education